What I learned from attending an SEO event in Silicon Beach

Published in

California Dreaming

18 min readFeb 25, 2020

Before the event: 🎀

I woke up to the rumbling sound of my alarm for another 4:30 A.M. morning. This rumbling alarm was shortly followed by the consumption of my breakfast, drive to my university, run on the treadmill, and another full day of classes. Later in the day, I decided to attend an event in Silicon Beach that was about SEO and social media growth. The speaker for this event had about 15 years of experience in SEO, so I was intrigued to learn from him.

During the event: 🌀

This free event was hosted at General Assembly in Santa Monica, which is across the street from Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade. Attendees had to check-in upon arrival and find some seats. Upon starting his talk, the speaker asked the crowd if they were more interested in learning about SEO or social media growth, and the crowd’s favorite went to SEO. The speaker spoke for two straight hours, lasting from 7 P.M. to 9 P.M. The first hour was about SEO and the second hour was about social media growth. The speaker was very passionate about these subjects, which made the talk a lot more intriguing.

Speaker’s Background: 👶

The speaker’s name is Brandon Leibowitz. He works within the internet marketing industry, with his strengths being in email marketing, SEO, social media marketing, Google AdWords, affiliate marketing, media buys, email marketing, paid advertising, analytics, and more. Brandon also does a full-service digital marketing agency which he started in January 2008, called SEO Optimizers. He shortly started this agency after graduating from California State University — Long Beach in 2007. Some of his major clients include MGM, General Electric, and Belkin.

Information from this event: 📝

“You are competing against huge companies in SEO and social media, not just with each other.”

Why use SEO: 🤔

▶️ SEO will get you free traffic without paying for Ads

“He focused mainly on growing organically and not paying for Ads.”

▶️ Google Ads are expensive

“Google charges an extra 50% to your Ad spend, so if you buy $5 in Ads, Google will charge you $7.50 since they hide this extra fee in their terms.”

▶️ SEO maximizes visitors to a specific webpage

▶️ You cannot rely mainly on Bing, Google, and Yahoo

Scams with SEO to avoid: 😵

▶️ When agencies say they have guaranteed results

▶️ When agencies are low cost they have low-quality results

▶️ When there are submissions to search engines

“When they say they know someone at Google.”

▶️ When they say they have secret SEO strategies

▶️ When they say they are the lowest priced SEO

Keywords: 🕵

▶️ It is really important to know what Google looks for, such as having the right keywords

▶️ You need to find keywords that people search for, a lot of his clients want to rank for keywords that almost no one searches for

▶️ If you put the wrong keywords then you need to start all over again

▶️ The Google Keyword Planner is free and good, there are tons of different ones

⏩ Although, you have to sign up for Google Adwords and pay for that to use the Google Keyword Planner

▶️ When using Google Adwords, you have to put your daily budget at $5 minimum

⏩ You will be spending 50% more according to Google’s terms and service

⏩ Somehow Google can get away with spending 50% more of your budget, Facebook does not do that

▶️ Keyword Spy is a good keyword search tool and many more

▶️ He says to pick one keyword tool

▶️ Paid keyword tools have a lot more information on competitors and are better for competitors than the Google keyword search tool

▶️ Anything with two words or less is a broad keyword which people search for a lot

▶️ Long-tail keywords are 3 words or more

“People are more likely to buy from this type of keyword even though there are less people searching for it, overall it is better to rank for a long-tail keyword.”

▶️ Really important to rank for targeted keywords

⏩ An example: when someone searches for weight loss, they may be looking for a gym and not a product to buy

▶️ Main keywords are in the page title and meta description

▶️ 60 characters for the title tag are generally shown if more characters then dots are shown

▶️ The title tag length is very important for each page

▶️ The more pages your website has, the more keywords you can put

▶️ The title tag is where you put the title of a webpage

▶️ The title tag is the blue clickable link when you do web searches

▶️ The green link, under the blue title tag link, is the meta description that contains the keywords which are really important

➡️ Tip: He looks at what other people use for their blue clickable links since these other people have done all the keyword research for him

▶️ The big companies usually have a team do the keyword research, so they are doing half the work for you

▶️ Keywords change over time and trends emerge

“He sees words in the title tag and meta description that have words like jackets or jeans, but not clothing.”
“Although, Google will still rank that website for clothing.”

⏩ He says keywords are still important, but not as important as they used to be

▶️ The meta description is 160 characters or less, do not need to worry about keywords here

▶️ The meta description is really important

▶️ It helps to have keywords in the URL

▶️ Make sure the URLs have keywords in them

▶️ Google looks at the title tag, URL, and content of your webpage

⏩ You have to have all these pieces and just some hope

▶️ He never really changes the keywords for his sites

⏩ Once you add keywords, you don’t really need to change them unless new trends emerge

⏩ Once you’re done with keywords, you’re kinda done with them

Backlinks: 🔗

▶️ Need to build backlinks

▶️ If you see a clickable link in an article and click on it, it will take you to another website, this is called a backlink

⏩ So the more clickable links (backlinks) that link to your website, the higher your website ranks

⏩ Although there are some scammy links, so Google knows if the backlink is going from a doctor website to a wedding one which would look bad

“Anyone can build a website and put all these keywords on their websites, so backlinks are proof to Google that if anyone is talking about you, or giving clickable links that point back to your website it gives more credibility to Google.”

▶️ Google sees some things as spamming and will take you off their search results if you are seen as spamming, so it is really important to not have backlinks that look spammy

▶️ The bigger the website, the more power the SEO backlink has

▶️ Each website strength is different

▶️ He can still build thousands of backlinks that rank him, but now Google has done something

▶️ As long as you build good quality relative backlinks you are good, the more relevant and bigger the backlinks, the better

▶️ An example would be if The New York Times backlinks to your website, Google will rank you higher than a smaller website

▶️ A lot more SEO value comes from the big websites, but they are a lot harder to get onto

▶️ The backlinks don’t really need anything, an image could be a backlink, or could be a clickable link with words

⏩ The more you mix up the type of backlink, the more natural it looks to Google since the more alike the backlinks are, Google knows this and penalizes your website along with dropping your SEO

“If you are hit with penalties, you will lose half your traffic, maybe even more, rarely websites are dropped off searches.”

▶️ Google has to go through all your backlinks, which makes it really tough to get out of penalties

⏩ Since the more backlinks you have linked to your webpage, the more someone has to search through all these different backlinks to find the penalty or penalties for removal

▶️ Look at your competitors' websites, there are tools to see all of their backlinks

▶️ Do not use tools that build backlinks since you want high-quality ones

▶️ ahrefs.com — paid tool about $80 to $100 a month, better to use if you’re a company, but if smaller then maybe buy for one month

▶️ His website could have a thousand pages with thousands of backlinks on each page

⏩ Although, what matters is how many websites are doing the same sort of website as you, and not how many backlinks you are competing against

▶️ Each backlink is weighed differently, so it is not about exact numbers

▶️ Bigger websites give more SEO values

▶️ If there is an article similar to yours written on the L.A. Times, he suggests to email that writer and sees how you could get featured too

“Backlinks are like stock, you don’t want to have all the same, like how you don’t want all PR to be the same.”

▶️ Do not want only big websites with backlinks to your site, you also want some small ones

▶️ The Google algorithm can change and start to not like certain backlinks that it was fine with before, then it will penalize you for having those backlinks it now dislikes

▶️ Reaching out to other websites to pitch an article is good for you since they put it on their website for free, and you are also getting a free article linked back to you

▶️ The only way you know you’ve been penalized is if your traffic has dropped

▶️ The Google Search Console might tell you that you’ve been penalized, but maybe not

“Google doesn’t care that you’ve been penalized, they might tell you one backlink has been penalized, but you could have thousands of backlinks.”

▶️ He says 5–10 backlinks is good to create each month

▶️ One high-quality backlink could surpass 100 low-quality backlinks

▶️ People could spam you with backlinks, but you can use a tool in the Google Search Console and block these backlinks since some porn websites do that

▶️ Quality over quantity with the backlinks

Search engine traffic: 🔍

“There are hundreds of different search engines, but the most used is Google.”

▶️ Google brings in 20–60% of traffic and just dominates it

▶️ Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo bring about 1% of the search traffic

▶️ With optimizations, it really depends on where the traffic is coming from, so you have to adjust your optimizations to match the type of search engine someone is finding your site from using

▶️ Google brings in the most traffic

▶️ DuckDuckGo is starting to get big

Optimizing for search engines: 📈

▶️ Optimize for specific search engines, all your optimizations cannot be the same or your SEO won’t work as well

▶️ Above the websites shown on Google, there might be a few Ads or none, it is all really random

▶️ Google really personalizes their searches so it would look different on all our different phones

▶️ The goal is to get as much real estate on the front page of Google

▶️ Google only shows YouTube on their videos section, 90% of the time, once in a while there might be something else

⏩ Google shows YouTube videos since Google owns YouTube

▶️ Having a presence on YouTube is great, you don’t need a real video, could just put some slides in a video to get traffic since people like to see videos more than reading

“The more real estate you can take up on the internet the better.”

▶️ Sometimes Google shows images, but not always

▶️ SEO is not just optimizing your website, it’s about optimizing every single page on your site since each page is an opportunity to rank on Google

⏩ Can only rank for 3–5 keywords per page, every single page on your website is a chance to get shown, the more pages you have, the more you increase your visibility

▶️ There are only 10 spots on the first page of Google, so you would be pushing someone off the first page if you got one of those first 10 spots

▶️ When someone pushes him off the first page of Google, he looks up their keywords and creates backlinks to get his spot back, it is a battle

“You have to fight to get a spot on the first page of Google if there is a lot of competition for your type of website.”

▶️ An example of websites that are constantly battling to stay on the first page of Google would be restaurants in Los Angeles

▶️ Make sure you keep your rankings up, or you will slip down through the spots on Google search

▶️ There is a lot of stuff about on-page optimization

How search engines rank: 🏅

“Search engines go around with things called spiders that crawl around the internet looking for keywords.”

▶️ Basic HTML is good, but you really don’t need to know any programming for SEO

▶️ Search engines are just robots and are not as smart as you think they are, people are trying to make them smart but are pretty far off

▶️ You can view the page source of a website to see what the search engine sees and what the engine looks for in this code with the spiders

⏩ The spiders crawl through the website line by line and look for actual text, such as the keywords in the content of the code, then they assign a value to the webpage

⏩ Google reads those words, and if your website has a lot of images, Google cannot read those images, so it is best to have a lot more words

How to rank high on search engines: ⏫

“At least 400 words of content on each page of your site, since you have to spoon-feed Google and let it know what your page is about.”

▶️ Original content is important, the person who posted the original piece of content first is usually most important in rankings

▶️ Put the original content on your website, if you don’t have content, then it is really hard to rank on Google

▶️ Google tends to have preferences for big businesses, so big companies do not need as much content

⏩ But if a company is small to medium-sized, it needs a lot of content

⏩ Although, it is also harder for small to medium-sized companies to rank higher since Google doesn’t know if the smaller company will go out of business or not

▶️ He says to throw the content on the bottom of the website if it is not necessary for people to read

▶️ Example target: 70% of people on the computer do not scroll down, if the content is not at the top then people will not really see it

▶️ Although more people scroll down on phones

▶️ He says to put content on the bottom of the webpage to help it rank in SEO, Google will still see the content for a ranking which is all that matters

▶️ The more content on the webpage, the more the search engine will know about the page

▶️ Look at who is on the first page of Google in your niche, how many backlinks do they have, how much content

⏩ Put more content than your competitors on your website, so if they have 400 words of content on their webpages, then you write 500 words of content on your webpages

“For 90% of companies, on their first page of their website, they have huge blocks of text at the bottom telling Google what their webpage is about.”

▶️ A big block of text does not really look good, but you have to give Google the content to rank higher on SEO

▶️ For any page, you want to rank on Google, write at least 400 words of content on it

▶️ If you have multiple webpages, put content on all of them, do not worry about ranking the “About Us” or “Contact” web pages since you don’t really want to rank those

“The more words you put on a webpage, the higher the SEO ranks, so it matters that you have more content than your competitors on your web pages.”

▶️ If they have 300 words write 400, 400 words are pretty standard, the more you put the more Google understands what your page is about

▶️ If your website has a bunch of videos or images, you still have to put a ton of text on those web pages since Google does not understand what the video or image is about, but it might be able to in the future with technological advancements

▶️ The more content you have on your website, the better

▶️ You do not need to worry about keywords in the content

Ranking high with an eCommerce site: 🛍

▶️ If you have an eCommerce website, then he says not to worry about adding content, but on the homepage should put text

▶️ Although, you can put text for the main products

The algorithm of Google: 🌟

“There is a top-secret Google algorithm and no one knows how it works, if anyone did that person would be a billionaire since he or she would appear first everywhere.”

▶️ Google had an algorithm update recently, and their algorithm changes all the time

▶️ They update their algorithm daily

▶️ Major updates are released every few months

▶️ He sees websites that don’t even have the keyword, but Google will still rank it since Google knows

▶️ Keywords naturally emerge to the content you write, so do not worry about them

▶️ Google and SEO changes all the time

▶️ Examples of major Google algorithm updates would be the Google Panda, Google Penguin, and Google Hummingbird algorithm updates

▶️ Google understands when there is duplicate content that someone copied and will penalize that person

▶️ The Google algorithm penalizes people

▶️ There is a free tool to see if the content has been plagiarized or duplicated

⏩ When plagiarism happens, Google penalizes that content and has its rank lower on its search results

▶️ copyscape.com — can put your website in there to see if someone plagiarized your website, you can check articles too, blog posts, whatever you want, it is free for websites but like 8 cents for articles

▶️ He is sure universities use this to check student’s work

▶️ Although Google knows some things on a webpage would be the same, such as phrases like “go to the top“

“You want 5–10% of the same matching words, ideally want as low as you can get, the more plagiarized the webpage matches other webpages, the less happy Google will be about it.”

▶️ An audience member said, “Five words in a row is plagiarism unless it is a quote.”

▶️ Google understands a little bit of plagiarism

▶️ Do not worry about learning all the algorithm updates

▶️ There are constantly new ways to figure out the Google algorithm

▶️ Google now has the Google Knowledge Graph which gathers all the information it can from various resources such as Wikipedia, etc. and uses this information to enhance its search engine’s results

▶️ Google constantly changes

▶️ Half of the websites on Google do not result in website clicks

Predictions of SEO: 🤓

▶️ Some people say SEO is dying and will disappear, but they were also saying that in 2007

▶️ SEO will not really disappear as long as people use search engines

▶️ He says to look into voice search, synaptic web

▶️ Traffic from mobile will continue to increase, so definitely jump on voice search

⏩ Try to optimize for things such as Alexa voice search, etc.

Some SEO terms: 💬

▶️ On-page SEO would be going on your page and making changes to the coding since these are things you can control within your own website to have it rank higher on SEO

▶️ On-page SEO also includes: site structure, sitemap, Robots.txt, link exchange, breadcrumbs, 404 errors, canonical URLs, speed, promotion, navigation, site usability, web design

▶️ Off-page is keywords

▶️ Off-site /off-page SEO would be anything not touching your website, such as social media to help rank it higher in SEO

▶️ Off-page SEO also includes: link building — quality over quantity, creating and distributing content, analyzing competitor backlinks, online reputation management, and local SEO

Suggested WordPress plugins for SEO: 🔌

“If you are on WordPress, there are plugins that take care of a lot of SEO things.”

⏩ With Ghost SEO, you do not need the paid version since the free one works as well

⏩ WordPress has more functionality for free

▶️ You can also upload the WooCommerce plugin instead of using Shopify if you want better SEO reach with WordPress

▶️ WordPress plugins take care of a lot

Traffic with Ads: 🚦

Do Ads help or does organic traffic❓

Ads and organic traffic are completely separate. They have no effect on each other.

Random: 💫

▶️ ClickFunnels are a little tricky and he needs to go deep into that

▶️ Google has Gmail free since Google wants to scan emails in order to know what Ads to show you

“Chrome is out there since Google knows that if you use DuckDuckGo on Chrome, Google still knows what you do on Chrome.”

▶️ So Google still knows what pages you visit and what Ads to show even though you are not using the Google search engine since you are still using the Chrome web browser

▶️ Everything changes so fast in marketing so it could all be outdated

▶️ Avoid black hat (unethical techniques), and always use white hat SEO

▶️ Follow Google Webmaster guidelines

An SEO Exercise for you: 🏃

1️⃣ Search for your company or name on the internet.

2️⃣ How many of the websites shown are yours?

3️⃣ How many webpages show your results?

After the event: 😜

After the event, everyone gathered around to network. People also asked the speaker some questions. The speaker also had some informational sheets set on a table and had us text a certain number to get slides from the presentation. I left around 9:30 P.M. to my car, then eventually drove home. Overall, I learned a ton from this speaker and he was really great! I also pretty much wrote down everything he said over the course of his 2-hour lecture.

Key takeaways: ✅

1️⃣ SEO will get you free traffic without paying for Ads

2️⃣ Google charges an extra 50% to your Ad spend, so if you buy $5 in Ads, Google will charge you $7.50 since they hide this extra fee in their terms

3️⃣ You need to find keywords that people search for, a lot of his clients want to rank for keywords that almost no one searches for

4️⃣ If you see a clickable link in an article and click on it, it will take you to another website, this is called a backlink

5️⃣ Google sees some things as spamming and will take you off their search results if you are seen as spamming, so it is really important to not have backlinks that look spammy

6️⃣ Google brings in 20–60% of search engine traffic and dominates web searches

7️⃣ SEO is not just optimizing your website, it’s about optimizing every single page on your site since each page is an opportunity to rank on Google

8️⃣ Search engines go around with things called spiders that crawl around the internet looking for keywords

9️⃣ At least 400 words of content on each page of your site, since you have to spoon-feed Google and let it know what your page is about

1️⃣ 0️⃣ Google updates their algorithm daily

1️⃣1️⃣ The Google algorithm penalizes people

1️⃣ 2️⃣ Chrome is out there since Google knows that if you use DuckDuckGo on Chrome, Google still knows what you do on Chrome

Tips: 🏁

1️⃣ Always research what your competitors are doing, then do more than them

2️⃣ When someone pushes him off the first page of Google, he looks up their keywords and creates backlinks to get his spot back, it is a battle

3️⃣ Original content is important, the person who posted the original piece of content first is usually most important in rankings

4️⃣ With the Ghost SEO WordPress plugin, you do not need the paid version since the free one works as well

5️⃣ You want 5–10% of the same matching words, ideally want as low as you can get, the more plagiarized the webpage matches other webpages, the less happy Google will be about it

6️⃣ SEO is not just optimizing your website, it’s about optimizing every single page on your site since each page is an opportunity to rank on Google

7️⃣ The goal is to get as much real estate on the front page of Google

8️⃣ Be careful of scams with SEO agencies

9️⃣ Do not use tools that build backlinks since you want high-quality ones